There are people who will tell you that captaincy doesn't matter much in one-day cricket. There are also people who will tell you that the earth is flat. One-day cricket isn't just hit and giggle – it's hit, giggle and scheme. Captaincy isn't just tactics and strategy. It's management: motivation, concentration, inspiration and innovation. Good captains create a culture, knit a fabric out of 10 different personalities, bring the best out of their players, keep cool in a crisis and rise to the big occasion.

You can be a fairly poor captain and still win plenty of Test series, as Sanath Jayasuriya has been demonstrating for the past few years. You may even win plenty of one-day matches, as long as you have a lethal weapon in your team. But in the World Cup the arsenal counts for less than the general.

West Indies won the cup with a modest set of bowlers in 1975 (Bernard Julien, Keith Boyce, Vanburn Holder) and lost it in 1983 when they had probably the greatest attack in one-day history, with Malcolm Marshall coming on first change, swiftly followed by Michael Holding. The cup slipped from their grasp, perhaps never to return, because Kapil Dev seized the day and produced the fielder's equivalents of a captain's innings – he also drew fine performances out of a bunch of medium-pacers who would have been flattered to be described as modest.

In a world of a million one-day internationals, the World Cup remains something special. Bad captains need not apply. Only six men have held the cup aloft, and every one of them was hugely influential.

The definitive captain's innings
Clive Lloyd led West Indies in three World Cup finals and in the first two he was up against a tactical intelligence greater than his own. In 1975 Ian Chappell was the world's top captain, basking in a 4-1 demolition of England in Tests and heading for 5-1 against the West Indians, while Lloyd was new to the job and hadn't yet worked out that the way forward was to share the bowling between the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

I was at that final, watching through the wide eyes and thick glasses of a cricket-mad 12-year-old. When Lloyd loped out to bat with his cuddly-panther walk, West Indies were teetering at 50 for 3. He produced the definitive captain's innings, a century of power and control off only 85 balls, while Rohan Kanhai, at the other end, played an ex-captain's innings – a crucial, unglamorous 55 off 105 balls. West Indies' total of 291 is still the highest made in a World Cup final.

When Ian Chappell set about matching Lloyd, Australia had a good chance. Their demise is usually attributed to Viv Richards and his three direct-hit run-outs – which were fabulous, but shouldn't stop us asking why the Aussies took so many risks between the wickets. It was Bill Clinton's law of one-day cricket: it's the run-rate, stupid. And the bowler who stifled them was Lloyd himself with his part-time medium pace: 12 overs for only 38 and the wicket of Doug Walters, the batsman best equipped to break the chains. It was off Lloyd's bowling, too, that Ian Chappell was run out.

Four years later, against England, Lloyd wasn't needed so badly, although West Indies again stumbled to 50-odd for three. A salvage job was required as Lloyd joined Richards, and he quietly provided it. Richards took the lead while Lloyd played the Kanhai role, making only 13 as they added 44 – just enough to steady the ship.

Lloyd fell to an exceptional caught-and-bowled from Chris Old, but the stage was set for Collis King's great 86 off 66 balls, an innings of such exuberance that it later became part of Viv's after-dinner speaking routine – the joke being that although he made 138 not out, he was reduced to a spectator.

That 1979 final wasn't so much won by Lloyd as lost by Mike Brearley. As if trying to reassure cricket dimwits everywhere, Captain Cerebral became Captain Cock-up for the day. He packed his side with batsmen and relied on three of them – Graham Gooch, Geoff Boycott, and Wayne Larkins (who had never bowled in an ODI before) – to get through 11 overs. They had combined figures of none for 86.

Then Brearley opened the batting himself with Boycott; as Scyld Berry later observed, even at a pinch you could not call these two hitters. Their partnership of 129 was possibly the worst century stand in cricket history, using up 38 overs and wasting the long middle order – Derek Randall, Gooch, David Gower, Ian Botham, with Larkins at seven - for which the fifth bowler had been sacrificed.

Boycott, perhaps under the impression that the match ran to five days, didn't reach double-figures till the 17th over, and legend has it that Lloyd did his best to make sure he and Brearley stayed in. Again, Lloyd used his spare-part bowler well, squeezing 10 overs out of Richards's gentle offbreaks at a cost of only 35.

The superhero
In 1983 it was Lloyd's turn to be the loser. Kapil had already done something that tends to mark out a World Cup-winning captain: he had rescued his side from disaster in an earlier round, coming in at 9 for 4 against Zimbabwe, then a minnow, and playing not so much a captain's innings as a superhero's – 175 off 138 balls with six sixes.

In the final, India could hardly outgun a team that included Andy Roberts, Joel Garner, Marshall and Holding, as well as Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Richards, Lloyd and Jeff Dujon. So they outwobbled them. On a damp English June day the West Indians were 50 for 1 chasing a meagre 183, with Richards already on 33, when Kapil pulled off his catch. He caught Lloyd as well, to make sure, and then unleashed the full force of Mohinder Amarnath and Madan Lal. It was a fable come true: the hare defeated by the tortoise.

Mr Motivator
Four years later came the only Ashes World Cup final, held, improbably, at Eden Gardens, Calcutta. The captains, Allan Border and Mike Gatting, were well matched – both stumpy, plucky and gritty. Each had just won a semi-final against a captain with home advantage and much more charisma – Australia had seen off Imran Khan's Pakistan in Lahore, and England had been so rude as to beat Kapil's team in Bombay. Border was the better batsman, Gatting the sharper thinker. Or so we thought.

Australia made 253 for 5, which was about par; it would have been fewer but for Border's quickfire partnership of 73 with Mike Veletta, who proved to be the Aussie Madan Lal with 45 off 31.

Border's knack of getting an unfancied player to rise above himself showed up again when England batted. After his specialist spinner, Tim May, proved ineffectual, Border tossed the ball to a part-timer – himself. Gatting's eyes lit up, he reverse-swept Border's first ball, and popped up an easy catch. Border ended up with 2 for 38 and the cup; Gatting never won another Test match.

The wounded soldier
In Australasia in 1992, there was a new format, all-play-all instead of groups, which sounds fair but was actually dull – sudden death is what makes the World Cup go round. It meant that a team could start poorly and still reach the semi-finals by finishing fourth in the league.

Pakistan started abysmally. Imran Khan told them they had to fight like cornered tigers, a rallying cry as famous as anything Test cricket has produced. He himself was a wounded soldier: hampered by a bad shoulder, not to mention the fact that he was 39 and had long since given up first-class cricket, he bowled wily medium-paced inswing which may have worked only because it made the batsman wince.

He batted at No. 3 and when Pakistan were 24 for 2 in the final against England, he dug in with Javed Miandad. After 16 overs, Imran had a Boycott-like nine, but then Graham Gooch dropped him. He went on to compile a handsome 72 off 110 balls, laying the foundation for some more decorative stuff from Inzamam-ul-Haq and Wasim Akram.

Then, when England were getting on top, Imran brought back Akram in mid-innings. Akram bowled Allan Lamb with a ball that swung in and seamed out, and next ball he gave Chris Lewis one that was heading for a wide outside off until it jagged in to hit off. To English eyes, it was most unfair. Didn't the Pakistanis realise that the middle part of the innings was a time for sitting back and allowing four singles an over?

The other captain of the 1992 tournament was Martin Crowe, whose New Zealand team made the early running and tore up the script in two ways. They used a spinner, Dipak Patel, as an opening bowler, and a middle-order batsman, Mark Greatbatch, as a marauding opener with a licence to belt.

No longer a pushover
The first idea didn't catch on; the second changed the face of one-day cricket, although it took an injury to a Sri Lankan opener, a bright idea from a manager (Duleep Mendis), a receptive ear from a coach (Dav Whatmore) and a captain who believed in it (Arjuna Ranatunga) to make it happen.

For 25 years one-day openers had seen off the new ball and hoped to be 60 for no more than one after 15 overs. For Sanath Jayasuriya and Romesh Kaluwitharana, the idea was to hit the cover off the new ball and be 100 for one, two, three, whatever. From a nation that was still young and widely assumed to be meek and mild, it was brilliantly audacious. If it didn't come off, Ranatunga didn't lose faith: his specialist batsmen were still to come. He had another idea too: use four spinners on the slow subcontinental pitches. Mark Taylor, another fine captain, had been able to outwit West Indies in the semi-final as Shane Warne took 4 for 36, but in the final, he had no answer to Rantaunga's wiles. Sri Lanka won by a comfortable seven wickets, Warne took 0 for 58, and Ranatunga himself strolled to 47 not out.

The historian
Steve Waugh studies cricket history, and in England in 1999 he made it himself by doing an Imran. Australia started feebly and began the Super Six stage in sixth place (four behind Zimbabwe). Although they saw off India and the mighty Zimbabweans, they still had to beat South Africa. Chasing a hefty 271, they were 48 for three when Guess Who came in.

He scored 56 before chipping a simple catch to Herschelle Gibbs, who caught it for a second, celebrated too soon and lost control of it. Waugh probably didn't say, "Mate, you just dropped the World Cup," but that's how the story has it and the world is sticking to it. He made 120, Australia won, and went into the semi-final between the same teams with an edge on run-rate which proved to be the difference between them. Hansie Cronje, who had run rings around Waugh in some one-day games in Australia 18 months earlier, was never the same again.

The moral of the story is this. A painter who uses a small canvas is still a painter.

Tim de Lisle is the editor of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 2003.

What's the best piece of captaincy you've seen in a World Cup? Click here to send us your feedback.

This article originally appeared in the January 2003 edition of Wisden Asia Cricket.

Subscribe to Wisden Asia Cricket
Subscribe to Wisden Asia Cricket in India

© Wisden CricInfo Ltd